LEO MATIZ
REPRESENTED ARTIST
Leo Matiz is considered one of the tenth most influential photographers of the 20th century. His work as a photojournalist led him to travel extensively around the world, meeting and making friends with some of the most relevant figures of the 20th century. Matiz was born in Aracataca, Colombia, in Garcia Márquez's Macondo, in 1917. His photography witnessed the most significant events in our history. Matiz also had important contributions in the fields of advertising, cinema, caricature, and the art market, the latter by founding the first art gallery in Bogotá, in which the work of Fernando Botero was exhibited for the first time. Matiz has been internationally recognized and was decorated by the French government as "Chevalier des Arts et des Letters" in 1995. He also received the "Filo D'Argento Award" in Florence, Italy, and the government of Colombia paid tribute to him in 1988. Matiz died in 1998, but his work will endure for posterity. The work of Leo Matiz is exhibited at the MoMA in New York.
ARTWORKS
Frida Khalo Series
Leo Matiz, one of the most important photographers in Latin America, lived in Mexico in the The 1940s and was a close friend of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, whom he immortalized with his camera. The estate of Leo Matiz in collaboration with the conservators of the artist's clothes was inspired by these vibrant traditional Mexican dresses to color the portraits that Leo Matiz took of Frida in the happy moments of her life. The estate used the original black and white negatives in combination with the art of coloring photos by hand, a technique which emerged in the nineteenth century, to create this limited edition set of images, capturing the spectacular hues of Frida’s everyday clothing. Frida Kahlo's wardrobe remained hidden for fifty years with about 300 outfits revealed to the public in 2004. These intimate colored portraits allow viewers a glimpse of the culture of Mexico in the forties and the intimacy of the friendship of Frida through the lens of Leo Matiz, who captured her artistic expressive force. These images are also an attempt to temporize, with sophisticated technical procedures, an homage to the art of color photography, capturing its vivid tones the regional clothing of the great Mexican, and universal painter Frida Kahlo.
Black & White Series
Black and white photographs that reveal the various facets and aesthetic searches of the legendary Colombian photographer, recognized as the creator of memorable realistic, abstract and avant-garde images. They turned Leo Matiz into one of the most original and innovative personalities of universal photography in the 20th century.
